"The problem is mental health and school security, not guns," Crook said. "The guy who had the gun, he broke, I don't know, 14, 15 laws. So he's a criminal. So why are they trying to penalize a legitimate citizen in the state with the fifth best-rated gun laws in the nation and impact upon hunters, target shooters, self-protection advocates? I don't understand. We're going in the wrong direction."

He said the coalition, which unsuccessfully fought the state's 1993 ban on assault-style weapons, would present its own plans within a few days.

Crook said that there are "some reasonable" proposals among the CCM goals, including a possible ban on the sale of body armor. Other suggestions included a requirement that all rifles be registered; and expanding the list of offenses that would prohibit people from owning firearms.

"Registration of long guns? It's never going to happen because people aren't going to abide by that," Crook said. "We've got millions of guns in this state. Who's going to handle this? State Police? They don't have enough people to work the roads."

The CCM event at the Capitol complex was led by big-city mayors, including Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch and New Haven's John DeStefano Jr. in response to Adam Lanza's Dec. 14 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Lanza shot and killed 20 students and six adults after first killing his mother and taking her legally registered weapons.

He used an assault-style Bushmaster rifle in the school massacre.

Crook said that the vast majority of such weapons are used legally and safely for target practice. "Are you going to blame all the owners of so-called assault weapons in the state for a guy who was illegal?" Crook said. "A guy who used a firearm in murders?"

"We're here because an atrocity of unspeakable proportions happened 20 miles from my house," Finch said. "Today's my son's seventh-year birthday. I'm sick of people telling me that his rights to be safe take a back seat to somebody's ridiculous infatuation with a war weapon. This is not what this state is about. This state is about protecting the babies. We lost 20 futures and their families lost 20 futures."

Finch and DeStefano acknowledged that most murders are not "spree shootings" like Newtown, but occur singly, in the big cities among urban males using handguns. Finch said that gun violence actually takes away the civil rights of citizens and that there is no constitutionally protected right for people to have body armor.

"We're here to be reasonable, to push for good legislation, much of which we feel is long overdue," Finch said. "We should all congratulate the legislature of New York for passing the first piece of legislation with an assault weapon ban strengthened, because if we can model the New York legislative behavior in this building, we'll all be safer in the future."

Finch asked for hunters to support new Connecticut laws. "Come out and be with us," he said. "We are not the enemy. We're your friends and we're here to keep everybody safe. Mayors have to do that. We're the ones that end up going to the shooting scenes. We're the ones that go to the funerals and we're sick of it."

"This is about responsibilities attendant to gun rights," DeStefano said. "The goal here is to make Connecticut better, not perfect, better."

None of the 75 homicides in New Haven over the last three years have involved assault-style weapons, DeStefano said. "They're largely in minority communities and the victims are typically African-American males."

He said that requiring criminal background checks prior to all gun sales -- an estimated 40 percent are not subject to such review -- would help combat Newtown-style mass killings, but also urban shootings.

Finch acknowledged that the CCM "will be darned lucky" to get a few of the proposals passed into law. "There's no slippery slope. There's a slippery slope that I'm sliding back on trying to protect public safety. There's no slippery slope losing the right to bear arms," Finch said in response to a reporter's question. "There are millions of weapons in the state of Connecticut and they're all over the place and people are buying them like crazy, not understanding the fact that you're 43 times more likely to be injured with your own weapon in your own home if you have a gun."